


(Each Leaf) Addressed to You

by the_rck



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mokuton, Multiple Timelines, Physical Time Travel, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Referenced Neji/Tenten, Referenced canonical character death, Second Hokage Era, Summons Realm, Time travel via dreams, nature spirits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-13 08:54:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29150781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: Tenten was just trying to get home. Now she's in the past and trying to figure out if she can-- or should-- change anything.Of course, she kind of has already. It was an accident. Mostly. Next time, though, she wants it to be deliberate.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2020





	(Each Leaf) Addressed to You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vendettadays](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vendettadays/gifts).



> Title from Rae Armantrout's poem, "Address."
> 
> Tenten's amnesia regarding details of the ending of Naruto is intended to cover my wobbly memory of them. Also, my canon knowledge is manga only. My anime knowledge is via osmosis, so I apologize if there are details that don't fit with the anime version.

Tenten ran. She wasn't sure who was chasing her, but, given that she wasn't where she remembered being, she didn't want to gamble that they were friendly.

The Legendary Sucker wasn't an aspect of Tsunade-sama that Tenten wanted to emulate. Tenten wasn't heir to a founding clan, and she couldn't break mountains with her fists. She couldn't afford to bet without marking the deck or loading the dice.

Also, whatever was back there moved like a horde of feral, drunken hogs. Fast, heavy enough to break everything in their wake, too big and too addled to stop even if she turned and managed to kill the first two or three.

She might not have the right weapons to kill even one. She knew she didn't have a boar spear, and she wasn't sure she had anything with similar reach. Swords weren't long enough, and kunai and senbon would bounce off the hide.

Best case, they weren't actually chasing _her_ , and she was just in the way.

Well, no. Actually, best case would be that she was being chased by... Hm. A horde of puppies that just wanted to be friends? Tenten liked puppies, and even giant puppies shouldn't be that bad. Or maybe giant bunnies-- 

No. Absolutely not. She couldn't remember why she hated rabbits, but she'd definitely take the carnivores over bunnies.

Worst case? Probably immortal, mutant, zombie hogs. _Hungry_ , immortal, mutant, zombie hogs. She wanted to think that was impossible, but something deep in her mind was saying, "Yeah. Plausible," and, also, "Well, you wanted to be a ninja. I bet this shit never happens to plumbers."

She swerved up a steep and heavily eroded incline, using chakra to keep the earth firm under her feet. It would make her prints obvious to any sight tracker, but she doubted that anything that wasn't hunting her specifically would charge up after her. Even if it did, the ground was soft enough that most creatures wouldn't reach the ridge.

From the top, she'd be able to see whatever the hell it was. At least, she hoped so.

She needed to know where she was and what was going on. She didn't remember anything helpful to explain how she'd come to be running through woods that very definitely weren't anywhere in Fire Country.

Her team had run enough patrols and done enough deliveries that Tenten knew the trees. She turned to look over her back trail, and she put a little effort into identifying the trees beyond not-Fire-Country.

River. How had she gotten into the Country of Rivers? There hadn't been any fighting there, and--

Had she been fighting? If she had, where were her teammates?

The thing that had been following her came into view, and Tenten decided that she'd prefer the mutant, zombie hogs. The creature below was a giant lizard. Part of the noise she'd heard was it smashing sideways into trees that it either couldn't see or found incredibly offensive.

The good news was that it probably wasn't chasing her. The bad news was that it behaved like it was fleeing something terrifying. Tenten couldn't see anything behind it, but it was large enough to block her view.

Tenten leaned toward the theory that the lizard couldn't see because there was blood running down from where the creature's eyes ought to be. It was bleeding in several other places. Some of those injuries were jagged and had to come from hitting trees at high speed; others had cleaner, straighter profiles, probably from a sword.

Judging by the length of the gashes, they were probably from a sword wielded by a giant. Tenten remembered--

She pinched her left arm, hard. She didn't have time for terror right now, and she could feel the shape of a memory that would distract her.

Some of the trees the lizard crashed into fell, either fully or partially. Some only shook. The lizard ignored them all.

The creature opened its mouth and shrieked.

Tenten covered her ears then turned to run perpendicular to the path she expected the lizard to take. She'd be able to loop back later to see what might be chasing the lizard.

She didn't remember anything about giant lizards-- or giant anything-- in River. She was pretty sure that there'd have been aristocrats wanting to hunt trophies if such things were known, and she didn't see how anyone could miss even one.

Possibly it was a summon of some sort, but if it was, why hadn't it dismissed itself? Or had it dismissed and somehow taken her with it? That might explain why she didn't remember everything.

She could deal with that. She could find her way home.

____

Tenten missed her team. Partly, it was that surviving alone in enemy territory wasn't easy, and she didn't dare treat the place as anything friendlier. Mostly, though, she missed Neji, Lee, and Gai-sensei as specific people. She kept thinking of things she wanted to say to them and then realizing that she was still alone.

She hadn't had many solo missions. She had habits that tripped her up.

With nothing else to guide her, Tenten went toward where she would expect Konoha to be if she were in her own world. Maybe she could find the way home there.

Maybe the First Hokage's trees were close enough to this realm to open the way.

Every other option she could think of required trying to bargain for a summoning contract, and she didn't trust herself for it. Not without someone else to help her when she fucked it up.

She supposed she could try talking to them the way she always talked to Neji's uncle, but she wasn't afraid of the head of the Hyuuga clan in quite the same way.

Hiashi-sama was dangerous because he could punish Neji for Tenten's offenses. He hadn't, not even once, not that Tenten had ever found out, and Tenten was quite sure that Hiashi-sama would have made sure that she knew.

The various summons groups she'd seen from a distance here all made her feel like she was a spy, an intruder, a thief. She was a missing nin trying to find a village to take her in, and it was...

Tenten was ashamed.

____

Hashirama's trees cast shadows in the summons realm. Tenten had been right about that. She'd even been right that she could persuade them to help her return to Konoha.

Tenten's mistake was in thinking that those trees defined Konoha the same way she did. For a tree, the where was definite. The when was... fuzzier.

Tenten stepped out of a tree and into the First's funeral service. Then she collapsed from chakra exhaustion.

His face wasn't even on the mountain yet.

All she could think was that she was so very, very screwed because it was going to be decades before Konoha had another mokuton user to talk to the trees about getting her properly home. She'd be _old_ by then, older than Gai-sensei even.

Much too old to sit on a rooftop with Neji and eat carryout while trying to figure out how Lee was related to Gai-sensei.

The official records said he wasn't, but that seemed unlikely to the point of impossibility. Besides, gossip had nothing to do with facts.

Tenten took no comfort in having evidence that Lee actually could be one of Gai-sensei's ancestors. She hadn't ever thought it was true; it was just something to joke about-- If Lee wasn't descended from Gai-sensei's family, maybe they descended from him.

It still probably wasn't true, but it was now _plausible_. If Tenten hadn't already been on the ground, she probably would have fallen.

Rock Lee caused Maito Gai who caused Rock Lee who caused Maito Gai who--

It was probably lucky that she didn't-- couldn't-- run. If she'd run, someone would have killed her, probably the Second. All the stories said he had no mercy. 

As it was, she simply stared at the mountain in disbelieving horror until an impossibly young Sarutobi Hiruzen took her into custody.

____

Apparently persuading the trees to return a person to Konoha constituted a summoning contract which meant Tenten had mokuton. Sort of. Kind of. Enough to solve a major Senju religious issue, anyway.

Tenten had to infer a lot of that from context because admitting she didn't know-- Well, she wasn't sure what would happen, but it probably wouldn't involve good food and a day at the spa. 

Whatever the trees actually were, Tobirama-sama and the other Senju regarded them as gods. There'd been some sort of crisis of faith going on with Hashirama-sama dead and no one else having the vaguest flicker of connection to the trees.

Which meant that Tenten was received as literally god-sent. She wasn't, and she knew it, but all of the alternatives looked much worse.

Also, she couldn't get the trees to understand what the problem was, so she was stuck for now. They also didn't understand the concept of being worshipped or served, so being their miko wasn't likely to be a huge burden that way.

Tobirama-sama labeled her as a lost Senju bastard of some sort and slapped 'S-Rank Secret' on a dozen different things that she'd said or that he'd observed about her. When he told her that the time travel part was obviously delusion, he looked at her with such severity that she couldn't tell if he meant that she shouldn't show off her crazy or if he meant that the time travel was far enough beyond being an S-rank secret that she wasn't supposed to tell _him_ about it.

There probably were things the Hokage couldn't afford to know, so Tenten kept her mouth shut and pretended that she couldn't do half the things she'd learned in the Academy. People kept commenting that she was a very well grown twelve year old and doubting her when she pointed out that she was eighteen.

She was eighteen. She remembered that birthday clearly because she'd kissed Neji and he'd kissed her and they'd both stayed up all night.

Gai-sensei had alibied Neji to Hiashi-sama because Gai-sensei was great like that. Lee had offered, of course, but Sensei had averted that disaster without letting on that he knew it would be a disaster.

They'd all known it might be the last chance they had for a date because war had already--

It had been a really nice night, apart from the bit at the end when Neji had told her that, if he didn't make it and she did, he wanted her to be happy anyway.

Tenten had read between the words and realized that Neji expected to die. Which-- People targeted the Hyuuga during war because they were easy to spot and tactically important.

Tenten hadn't even been able to tell him not to take risks because Neji loved and hated with a full heart. He loved Konoha too much not to give everything he had. Including himself. Including Tenten. He--

He wasn't with her now.

Neji had never walked where Tenten was now. None of these people had ever met him. The Hyuuga here wore their hair a little differently and their clothing was cut differently.

Tenten never mistook any of them for Neji, not for more than half a second.

Still, going back in time wasn't entirely bad, she got to take lessons with Tsunade-hime. With not from. Tsunade was only six. 

Mito-baa-sama taught both of them things she thought all heirs to the Senju should know. That included a lot of things never even mentioned in the Academy.

Tenten now knew every breach of etiquette she'd ever committed against Hiashi-sama and every bit of rudeness that she could have gotten away with toward him while still be impeccably polite. She also knew what it meant that Naruto was an Uzumaki. She could perform every variation of the tea ceremony, and she could manage a large household.

Mito-baa-sama encouraged Tenten to keep her ninja skills sharp, and Tenten tried, but some of the things she did were wrong because no one in Konoha had seen them before.

Or because they were clan secrets she shouldn't know, and not even Senju clan secrets.

Mito-obaa-sama hadn't known about the Caged Bird seal. Well, she'd known it existed; the protective aspects relied heavily on people knowing they were there. She hadn't known it was so open to abuse. Or so openly abused.

Mito-obaa-sama disapproved. Profoundly.

Tenten hoped she hadn't gotten Neji's grandfather or great-grandfather or whatever murdered. She didn't want Neji sealed, but she wanted Neji to exist.

She spent half her time terrified that she was going to destroy her own future by altering the past and the other half trying to inspire Tsunade-hime to become everything that Tenten knew she could be.

Maybe they could even sidestep the booze and the gambling. Tenten wasn't sure they added to the Fifth's glory in any measurable way.

Focusing on getting Tsunade-hime to become Tsunade-sama was much easier than thinking about other things Tenten might be able to change. Wars, deaths, disasters, personal tragedies.

She dreamed about those things almost as often as she dreamed about Neji. She'd had to accept that dreams about Neji would come as they would because every time she tried to get herself to dream about Neji, she dreamed about Lee as a toddler instead.

Which was off-putting. Seriously off-putting. Baby Lee was darling and looked a lot less like Gai-sensei, but he was also very sad every time she saw him. He didn't recognize her, but she was an adult willing to give him hugs and encouragement.

She figured she might as well. Dreams were dreams, and baby Lee was probably really baby Tenten, so she was comforting herself. She supposed that she knew too much about baby Neji's trauma to be able to use Neji as a stand-in to comfort herself.

So she told Lee about her teacher and her team. She said more than she would have to a real child. She showed him how to hold a kunai and how to throw it. She explained the methods that real Lee had worked out for becoming an incredible ninja.

When Tenten woke from those dreams, she was more in awe of Lee than she ever had been when they were genin. He'd been annoying, and he'd been a constant and solid presence as part of her team. She hadn't really considered how much harder Lee had had to work than she had.

Lee had deliberately distracted Tenten from it. Gai-sensei had to have known. Neji... Well, Neji had been an asshole when they graduated. He just mostly aimed it at people who weren't part of his team.

The next time she dreamed about Lee, Tenten hugged him and cried.

Tenten still wasn't sure how she'd ended up in the summons realm, running from a rampaging lizard, but when she thought about it too hard, she had nightmares that woke the household but that she couldn't remember after.

The day after each nightmare, Tenten somehow only saw the female members of the household. She wasn't naive enough not to realize why, what they assumed had traumatized her. That assumption probably explained why everyone treated her as younger than she was.

She kept checking the mirror. She looked like herself. Mostly. She wore her hair differently, and, maybe, there was more baby fat in her cheeks. Maybe she looked smaller than she remembered.

Okay, yes. She looked years younger than she was. It was weird. She didn't feel like she was smaller. She knew how her body moved, and it was the same. She still had her scars. Every last one.

Maybe it was the damned trees. Everything else was the trees.

Or maybe it was just her having shown up looking like she'd spent months without reliable access to food or soap or materials for mending her clothes. Because she had.

She'd done pretty well for herself, given the givens, but she'd been afraid to hunt or trap animals, including fish and insects, because she didn't want to risk hurting any summons creatures, let alone actually eating one. That had put eggs off the menu, too.

Looking like that hadn't given anyone a high opinion of her survival skills.

She'd have explained, but... S-rank secret.

And, even if it weren't, none of them would believe the truth about the nightmares. They were more likely to focus on the fact that she didn't remember pieces of her past. They thought she was having mood swings, too.

If Tenten was honest, they weren't wrong about that last part. At least they were willing to let her take to the trees when she was most upset. The trees were soothing because they never hinted that she was lying, never thought they knew better than she did, never expected anything except that she remain herself.

Dealing with the Senju was easier when they treated her as a traumatized child as opposed to a hard bitten veteran enemy infiltrator.

When she asked the trees, the answer was always the same. _Seeds fall where seeds fall. Grow as long and as well as you can. Keep reaching for the sun and the water._

Maybe the Senju had something when they talked about those with mokuton as god-touched. The trees were bigger than she was and entirely alien while still being welcoming. They also only talked to her because she'd done a proper pilgrimage to seek their aid.

The vegan diet had been entirely appropriate to that sort of quest, or so the trees said. If she'd killed during her travels, the trees wouldn't have bothered with her. As it was, they only did because she had seen the end of--

Of something important and devastating. Worse than three wars, worse than the Fourth's sacrifice, worse than Orochimaru's experiments, worse than Neji's childhood.

If she remembered what it was, maybe she could change it for the better.

She also might make it so that she was never born, and she had no idea what happened then because, logically, if it did, she couldn't travel back in time to make any changes at all.

The trees didn't understand that part. For them, all times were now in the same way that every drop of water in a river was the river.

Tenten hated the fact that all of the decisions were hers. She was pretty sure that Shikamaru would have twenty seven different plans for how to get the future he wanted. Naruto would simply keep going until the world changed for him. Ino would know how to make these people trust her. Sakura would remember every detail of the history she'd studied. Neji--

Neji would be too obviously a Hyuuga to be able to have even as much freedom as Tenten did.

Tenten was a weapons master. The only things unique about her were that she was here, now, knowing what she knew about the future and that she could sometimes persuade trees to help her.

Four months into her time in the past, Tenten begged the trees to hide and protect the paper upon which she wrote every detail she remembered about the upcoming years.

The part about keeping the paper dry was the hardest to get the trees to understand. The trees understood rot, but they couldn't understand what use Tenten had for material that would dissolve in water or why the patterns of ink mattered.

That discussion led to Tenten learning how to get a tree to grow something like paper and then to grow a thin layer of bark in certain places to make clear kanji. Eventually, that became as easy as using a brush or a pen. Easier even because she didn't have to carry anything with her when she went to make her notes.

She just needed to climb a tree.

Tsunade-hime was the only person who'd start a discussion with Tenten when she was in a tree.

If Tenten had been inclined to shirk her lessons, tree climbing would have been her go-to. She wasn't sure if it was religious awe or fear that the trees might retaliate. Maybe it was both.

Her dreams were gentler when she slept in a tree. She was more likely to dream about happy times with Neji, things that had really happened but not quite that way, or encounters with baby Lee that were entirely her own invention.

The dreams about Lee had an almost linear narrative, and she always knew they were dreams. They were so very real that she could smell the village she'd grown up in, and Lee remembered her. He called her nee-san.

His throwing had gotten more accurate, too. 

Tenten loved the idea that she could teach even if she was only teaching a figment of her imagination. Once, when she and Lee were wandering through Konoha, she saw Gai-sensei doing his shopping.

She went down on one knee so that she could speak directly into Lee's ear. "That's Maito Gai," she told him. "He's really good at the things you need to learn. The best. And he's kind."

Lee's eyes got big, and he bounced as if he was going to run over to Gai-sensei.

Tenten put a hand on his arm. "I know where he practices," she said. "That's probably a better place to introduce yourself. Just wait for when he's taking a break for water; you don't want him to think you're disrespectful."

Even a decade younger, Gai-sensei would _probably_ notice a four year old before accidentally stabbing him or running him over. If this was really Gai-sensei. Which it wasn't.

But still. Tenten thought this all worked better if she gave imaginary Lee good advice, kind advice.

Lee nodded.

Tenten stood and took his hand. Walking to Gai-sensei's training ground was as good a use of her dream as anything. She hadn't visited it in any of her Lee dreams.

There were too many real memories in that part of Konoha.

"Nee-san?" Lee said a couple of minutes later. "I made a friend." He sounded more tentative about it that Tenten expected.

"Are they nice?" Tenten kept her voice cheerful. She really hoped that Lee hadn't tried to play with anyone who'd bully him.

"He's sad," Lee said. "His name's Neji, just like the friend you talk about."

Tenten's heart froze.

Lee fidgeted. "I thought--" He took three gulping breaths before he went on. "Can I bring him to practice? He's..." Lee looked up at Tenten. "He doesn't have anybody."

Tenten knew that wasn't true, but she also knew that four year old Neji had thought it was. She didn't think she could bear even a completely imaginary baby Neji, not one so soon after his father's death.

It had to be that, or he wouldn't be sad enough and alone enough for Lee to notice.

Tenten hated that she hadn't thought to protect Neji's father. This was a dream; she could have. Now-- She made herself smile at Lee. "If you think he'd be willing to come, then sure." She tapped a finger on the tip of Lee's nose. "Any friend of Lee-kun's..."

She could do this. It would probably even make her less sad about having lost older Neji.

He was... Tenten knew that her Neji was dead. He'd died protecting Hinata. He'd died. So many people had.

She'd thought that she had, that she was going to, right before she found herself running.

Akatsuki. Madara who wasn't Madara or was. Tenten really wasn't sure that it mattered. There'd been a lot of different reveals about who was behind all the misery, and then a lot of enslaved and reanimated dead people. 

That was why she'd been thinking about zombies when she found herself in the summons realm. She was glad to have that cleared up because she'd been wondering.

The moon-- No.

She still didn't have that part, didn't want to, but she thought she had enough to be getting on with. She might not have risked all of reality just for Neji, but she'd already wanted to, desperately. The end of the world was enough to justify anything she tried.

And she'd already started changes accidentally. Every word she said, every choice she made.

Even the things she said and did in these dreams. She'd been treating them more carelessly than she should. Her life had become weird enough that she ought to be treating these dream events as real. 

Time passed for Lee when she wasn't there. He got older. He learned things from other people, and sometimes he surprised her. 

It had just been easier to think that it was all in her head. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't.

She hoped that it wasn't. That hope was a fragile sprout with a single leaf uncurling.

Lee was living in the Konoha she'd grown up in rather than in the Konoha that might come from Senju Tenten's actions, but that didn't mean his life-- or four year old Neji's-- was fiction.

They weren't _her_ Lee and Neji, but she could do so much to help them both.

She blotted her face on her sleeve. "Sorry, Lee-kun," she said in a voice that only shook a little. "I was remembering my Neji. I'll do better when I meet yours."

She would.

If nothing else, she could teach both boys twelve different ways to tell Hyuuga Hiashi to go fuck himself without appearing overtly defiant.

And Mito-obaa-sama had talked about several different approaches to a new seal that would 'fix' the Caged Bird seal without leaving visible evidence.

Tenten would learn all of them.


End file.
